The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.
I’m not documenting ballet here, I’m documenting an invasion. Real ballet, not the sugar plum bullshit, is already an act of defiance. But when I’m tracking these bodies through my viewfinder as they claim space in Chinatown or in the shadow of some brutalist ruins of Sutro Baths, I’m complicit in something else. I’m saying: watch this happen HERE. Not just in the sanctified spaces where art is supposed to happen, but in the places where people are actually living, grinding through their days, wondering what the fuck it’s all for.
I’m shooting San Francisco and it’s perfect because this city is already performing this high wire act between the sublime and the ridiculous. I know where the light cuts through fog at 4 PM. I know which alleys echo with footsteps and which ones just swallow sound. The city is my co-conspirator, all those angles, all that vertical ambition crashing into horizontal reality, all of it conspiring to make thes dancers vision hit harder.
The space isn’t just a backdrop in my frame, it’s in conversation with the dancer. The grime argues with the grace. The indifference of passersby becomes part of my composition. A guy walks through my shot and suddenly he’s part of the piece whether he knows it or not.
It’s guerrilla transcendence and I’m the one stealing it, freezing it, making it permanent. It’s beauty as a Molotov cocktail, and I’m lighting the fuse every time I hit record.